Symmetry: It's More Like a Guideline

“The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.” — Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

There’s some minor rumblings in the physics blogosphere about the latest research results announced this week from Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). No, not about the record-breaking temperatures that created another quark-gluon plasma, but about how one relatively minor tidbit about symmetry breaking was portrayed in a New York Times headline. “In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature” the headline declared. But as pointed out at Swans on Tea, and in greater detail on Cosmic Variance, symmetry breaking is in perfect accordance with the laws of physics:

Read More at http://news.discovery.com/space/symmetry-its-more-like-a-guideline.html

“The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.” — Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

There’s some minor rumblings in the physics blogosphere about the latest research results announced this week from Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). No, not about the record-breaking temperatures that created another quark-gluon plasma, but about how one relatively minor tidbit about symmetry breaking was portrayed in a New York Times headline. “In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature” the headline declared. But as pointed out at Swans on Tea, and in greater detail on Cosmic Variance, symmetry breaking is in perfect accordance with the laws of physics: